Philadelphia to ask residents to stay at home amid COVID-19

Philadelphia will ban outdoor gatherings and ask residents to stay at home beginning 8 a.m. Monday morning in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Outdoor exercise with social distancing and gatherings related to essential businesses like food or medicine will be permitted, the Inquirer reported. There are 91 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Philadelphia, The Temple News reported.

Pennsylvania is considering a similar “shelter-in-place” order for the entire state, where there are currently 479 cases, the Inquirer reported.

3 Comments

If you are a medical office but not a life sustaining medical office should you be closed? For example an office that hooks patients up to EMS units, cervical and lumbar decompression to help build a slip and fall, motor vehicle, and workers compensation case should they be open especially when you see 100 patients a day with no masks or hand sanitizer? I think the Governor needs to be a little more specific because they’re taking the fact that it’s medical and running with it. However, it’s not a life sustaining medical office.

This is beyond stupid. Everyone is jumping on this train and causing anxiety and panic. Just use common sense. When did the American people become so wimpy. It’s embarrassing. Cancer, heart disease and the flu have killed more people in a week.

I believe you are missing the point. Because this is a novel (new) virus, the general public is exposed to infection at a much higher rate, therefore maxing out our healthcare infrastructure. The order to stay at home is to mitigate, or spread out, the number of sick patients over a much longer period of time, thus flattening the curve.

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The Temple News has been the paper of record for the Temple University community since it first printed as Temple University Weekly on Sept. 19, 1921. The award-winning student publication, editorially independent of Temple, now publishes every Tuesday and daily online. The Temple News distributes 5,000 printed copies, free of charge, to the university’s primary locations in the Delaware Valley.